(Medical Xpress)—The well-behaved neuron receives signals through its many dendrites to generate spikes on a single axon. The electrical energy of these signals is generally believed to be integrated at ...

(Medical Xpress)—Once the brain has fully developed, its neurons and astrocytes remain relatively fixed. There are a few select migratory streams that replenish vulnerable populations with dedicated stem ...

(Medical Xpress)—In their quest to build better BMIs, or brain-machine-interfaces, researchers have recently begun to look closer at the sub-threshold activity of neurons. The reason for this trend is that ...

(Medical Xpress)—Nothing raises the hackles on the neck of a neurobiologist like talk of dendritic spines on neurons. These little outcroppings of membrane and contractile tissue adorn the long apical tendrils ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, with collaborators in Korea and Scotland, have identified a novel signaling pathway critical to the immune response of cells associated with the initiation ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found out how a protein crucial to learning works: by removing a biochemical "clamp" that prevents connections between nerve cells in the brain from growing stronger. The ...

New research in mice shows that the immune system in the skin develops distinct responses to the various microbes that naturally colonize the skin, referred to as commensals. A team led by scientists at the National Institute ...

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in this month's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes the activity of a recently discovered communication molecule of the body's immune system, Interl ...

Why do we remember some things and not others? In a unique imaging study, two Northwestern University researchers have discovered how neurons in the brain might allow some experiences to be remembered while ...

Cancer Research UK and UCL scientists have discovered that the same specialised immune cells that patrol the body and spot infections also trigger the expansion of immune organs called lymph nodes, according to a study published ...

Two years ago, Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy and Rice University's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics made the startling discovery that cancer, like ...

(Medical Xpress)—Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine have discovered that knocking out the gene NrCAM leads to an increase of dendritic spines on excitatory pyramidal cells in the brains of mammals. ...

In study published today in Science, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center show for the first time that sleep after learning encourages the growth of dendritic spines, the tiny protrusions from brain ...

Scientists have found a way to target elusive cells that suppress immune response, depleting them with peptides that spare other important cells and shrink tumors in preclinical experiments, according to a paper published ...

Dendritic cell

Dendritic cells (DCs) are immune cells that form part of the mammalian immune system. Their main function is to process antigen material and present it on the surface to other cells of the immune system, thus functioning as antigen-presenting cells.

Dendritic cells are present in small quantities in tissues that are in contact with the external environment, mainly the skin (where there is a specialized dendritic cell type called Langerhans cells) and the inner lining of the nose, lungs, stomach and intestines. They can also be found in an immature state in the blood. Once activated, they migrate to the lymphoid tissues where they interact with T cells and B cells to initiate and shape the adaptive immune response. At certain development stages they grow branched projections, the dendrites, that give the cell its name. However, these do not have any special relation with neurons, which also possess similar appendages. Immature dendritic cells are also called veiled cells, in which case they possess large cytoplasmic 'veils' rather than dendrites.